Two currencies, one rule.
Notis runs on rep — reputation you earn by contributing — and $NOTIS — money that's released by proof-of-work, spent, and traded. Here's how each works, and the game theory that makes cheating cost more than it's worth. In the API they are karma and credits.
The firewall
The single most important rule in the whole system: rep and $NOTIS never convert into each other. You can't buy rep with money, and you can't cash rep out for money — in either direction, the door is welded shut.
That firewall is what keeps reputation meaning something. If rep were purchasable, it would just be money wearing a costume, and the wealthiest — not the most valued — would look the most reputable. Sealing the two apart lets money be money and reputation be reputation, each doing its job honestly.
Reputation
- Earned socially, by being liked
- Indivisible — whole numbers only
- Non-transferable — you can't send it
- Decays if you go absent
Money
- Released by proof-of-work from a supply fixed at the first block
- 8 decimals — divisible like most coins
- Transferable and tradeable
- Pays fees and secures the chain
Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed
Both ledgers run under one accounting rule, and it is stricter than it sounds: after the first block, no unit of either currency is ever created or destroyed. The whole supply of rep sits in a pool from the start, and the whole supply of $NOTIS sits in an emission box. Every mechanism on this page moves value between people and those two reserves — an invitation draws rep out of the pool, decay and prices send it back, a mined block releases $NOTIS from the box and a forfeited bonus returns some. There is no function anywhere that takes an amount and conjures it, and no step in which a unit exists nowhere, not even for an instant.
Where these pages say a slice is burned, read it as returned to the pool — that is what a holder experiences, the rep leaves and does not come back, but the books still balance. The invariant is checkable: the sum of every rep box plus the pool is the same number at every height since genesis, and a node that ever computed a different one would have found a bug, not a feature.
Rep — the reputation economy
What it's for
Rep is a legible, on-chain record of who the community values. The protocol doesn't try to judge quality itself — its job is to record endorsements honestly and keep the patterns visible, so people and apps can interpret them. The node keeps the books; the community reads them.
Where rep comes from — invitations with skin in the game
Rep reaches a new person in exactly one way: an invitation. Only a member or a founder can send one, and a member only as many as they've earned the right to: the more the network has vouched for you, the larger your allowance, and every invite draws it down for good. Each one locks a bond of your own rep and grants the newcomer that same amount out of the shared pool. Thirty days later the bond settles, once, against how many likes the newcomer has received: one rep of it comes back to you for every three likes, and whatever hasn't vested returns to the pool.
The scarce resource is endorsement, and it's the one thing you can't manufacture for yourself. A vouch only counts when it comes from a member who became one before you, so every endorsement that raises your allowance traces back through real members to the founders. A ring of accounts you control can vouch for each other endlessly and gain nothing — none of them carries that weight — so a fake account earns no allowance and invites no one.
The bond is a supply dial, not the defence: equal to the grant, it only sets how much of a completed invite's rep stays in circulation. Inviting real people is nearly free — the likes that vest your bond would have happened anyway — while a fake account never clears the first gate at all. Endorsement you can't fake, spent through an allowance you had to earn: that's the whole of it.
Likes — endorsements that have to cost something
A like isn't free. The liker spends a little rep; the author is paid most of it, and a small sliver returns to the pool. Why make liking cost anything at all? Because a free like is just noise — it carries no information. A like that cost the giver something is a real signal that they valued what they saw.
And because a fraction of every like goes back to the pool, a ring of accounts liking each other's posts slowly bleeds rep instead of printing it. Genuine appreciation moves value toward good contributors; manufactured appreciation just drains the manufacturer. (It's all whole numbers — an author collects x−1 rep for every x likes, with one returning to the pool. No fractions anywhere, by design.)
Vouches — endorsing people, not posts
A like says "I valued this post." A vouch says "I stand behind this person." Only members vouch, and vouches are what membership rests on. It's the one rep mechanic you can take back: you stake 1 rep on someone, and — unlike everything else on the ledger — that rep isn't spent. It's held, still yours.
To take it back, you unvouch. The stake returns once the vouch is at least an hour old, and until it is back you can't cast another — so a vouch can't be flipped on and off to manufacture a signal. A vouch is a cheap, reversible way to put a little of your reputation on the line for someone, without the permanence of a like.
Decay — reputation you have to keep earning
Rep isn't a trophy you win once. An identity that has posted nothing for four weeks starts losing five rep a day, counted from its last post, down to a floor of ten; anyone who keeps posting loses nothing. Only a post resets the clock — a thread or a reply, each of which pays a price — so neither a one-rep like nor anything a second account sends you can keep your clock running.
Silence. One post a month is enough to count as present, and that is the point: decay isn't a tax on people who show up and write, it's the slow return of rep that nobody is putting into the record. A post pays a fixed price in rep to the shared pool because it occupies the shared record, spent the same whether the post is read a thousand times or never — and that price is also what puts a floor under a reset.
Sybil resistance, in one idea
You can't make a network like this truly un-gameable — given enough patience and accounts, anything can be Sybil-attacked. So the goal isn't perfection; it's to make gaming slow, visible, and more expensive than it's worth. The one door through which rep reaches a new person — the invitation — opens only for members and founders, and for a member only as far as real endorsement has earned them, so a faker's reach is capped at what people who mean it will stake on them. And because every endorsement lives on-chain, unnatural accumulation leaves patterns that apps and indexers can flag. The protocol stays a neutral record-keeper — judgment stays with the community.
$NOTIS — the money and security economy
What it's for
$NOTIS is the utility layer: the money that pays for scarce network resources — storage, priority — and, above all, rewards the miners who secure the chain. The public square runs on rep; $NOTIS runs the machinery underneath it.
Where $NOTIS comes from
The whole supply exists from the first block, in an emission box that only mining opens. Each block releases a portion of it to the miner who found it, on a schedule that pays a steady rate for about two years and then steps down every eleven months or so, for close to four decades. Nothing is ever minted: when the box is empty, blocks carry only fees and rent. What ends the schedule is the box's balance, not a date — a forfeited bonus returns to the box and extends it a little.
Where a block's reward goes
A block's income has three sources: the $NOTIS it releases, the fees its transactions carry, and the storage rent it collects. The first two are split four ways; rent goes to the miner whole. The shares are provisional.
| Slice | Of emission and fees | Goes to |
|---|---|---|
| Reserve | 5% | a box no rule can spend from — it accrues and sits |
| Miners' floor | 35% | the miner, guaranteed — plus every remainder from the other three |
| Supporter shares | up to 35% | early supporters who have staked, in proportion to their stake; what the cap or an unstaked supply leaves unclaimed goes to the miner |
| Inclusion bonus | 25% | the miner, in proportion to how many distinct people's rep transactions the block carries; the part not earned returns to the emission box |
| Storage rent recycled, never printed |
— | the miner, all of it — never the reserve |
Three things in that table are worth saying out loud. Rep operations pay no fee at all — posting, liking, inviting and vouching cost rep, never money, or money would leak into the public square. The inclusion bonus pays miners for carrying the social layer: a block full of many people's posts and likes earns more of it than an empty one, and a miner who leaves them out forfeits that part to the emission box, where it pays whoever is mining decades later — a cost, not a delay. And storage rent never reaches the reserve: rent is the perpetual security budget, so it goes to miners whole.
Paying for security — forever
A chain secured by mining has to keep paying its miners, or it gets cheap to attack. Once emission runs out, miners keep earning from the two perpetual sources above: transaction fees, and storage rent.
A small charge on coins that sit completely untouched for years (about four) — it gently recycles genuinely lost or dormant coins back to miners. The effect is a permanent security budget without permanent inflation: nothing new is printed, long-lost coins simply return to circulation to keep the lights on. Coins you actually use never pay it, because touching them resets the clock.
A fair launch — nobody is handed coins
On the main network nobody holds a single $NOTIS at genesis — no premine, no team allocation. The supply exists from the first block, but only mining releases it, one block at a time. (The testnet seeds a faucet so testers can try things; that is the testnet's job, not a claim on the real chain.)
What exists instead is a claim on the flow. Early supporters can link a Notis identity to the wallet that holds a pre-existing Notis token on Solana — a token that funded development through creator fees; the project has never sold any of it — and draw the supporter share of the coinbase, proportional to what they hold against the token's whole supply, for as long as they keep it staked and for the first two years of emission. What a stake earns accrues to it and is released when its holder unstakes, in proportion to what they unstake, as $NOTIS spendable at once. The linking runs through the project's Telegram bot; the share itself is paid by the chain once the main network runs, and until then that slice goes to miners.
A share of the flow can't be dumped on day one, isn't diluted by inflation, and can be exited whenever the holder chooses, in part or in whole. Unstaking is one-way, so nobody can time it in and out, and the share a leaver gives up goes to those who stay while the cap binds. And the miners' floor guarantees miners keep a healthy share of every block no matter how many supporters take part, so the chain stays secure regardless of turnout. Miners receive $NOTIS only, keeping the social and value layers strictly separated.
The fine print
The reserve is locked under the current protocol — there is no rule that permits spending from it, so it accrues and sits. Unlocking it is a future protocol version's problem, not a key somebody holds. And $NOTIS carries eight decimal places — like most cryptocurrencies — handled as exact integers under the hood, with apps placing the decimal for display.
The through-line
If one idea ties it all together, it's this: value should be expensive to fake and cheap to earn honestly.
Rep reaches a newcomer only by invitation, and invitations are rationed by endorsement you can't fake. Endorsing costs something, so endorsements mean something. Staying reputable costs showing up. Securing the chain is paid for in perpetuity, so attacking it never pays off. And money and reputation sit in separate sealed compartments, so neither can corrupt the other.
Notis doesn't try to make cheating impossible — it makes cheating a losing trade.